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Cultivated from the fierce ideas seeded in Blood Orchid, Blues for Cannibals is an elegiac reflection on death, pain, and a wavering confidence in humanity’s own abilities for self-preservation. After years of reporting on border violence, sex crimes, and the devastation of the land, Bowden struggles to make sense of the many ways in which we destroy ourselves and whether there is any way to survive. Here he confronts a murderer facing execution, sex offenders of the most heinous crimes, a suicidal artist, a prisoner obsessed with painting portraits of presidents, and other people and places that constitute our worst impulses and our worst truths. Painful, heartbreaking, and forewarning, Bowden at once tears us apart and yearns for us to find ourselves back together again.
Contains essays that depict and decry the rapid growth and disappearing natural landscapes of the Sunbelt
The author of more than twenty books and a revered contributor to numerous national publications, Charles Bowden (1945–2014) used his keen storyteller’s eye to reveal both the dark underbelly and the glorious determination of humanity, particularly in the borderlands between the United States and Mexico. In America’s Most Alarming Writer, key figures in his life—including his editors, collaborators, and other writers—deliver a literary wake for the man who inspired them throughout his forty-year career. Part revelation, part critical assessment, the fifty essays in this collection span the decades from Bowden’s rise as an investigative journalist through his years as a singular voice of unflinching honesty about natural history, climate change, globalization, drugs, and violence. As the Chicago Tribune noted, “Bowden wrote with the intensity of Joan Didion, the voracious hunger of Henry Miller, the feral intelligence and irony of Hunter Thompson, and the wit and outrage of Edward Abbey.” An evocative complement to The Charles Bowden Reader, the essays and photographs in this homage brilliantly capture the spirit of a great writer with a quintessentially American vision. Bowden is the best writer you’ve (n)ever read.
A post-9/11 novel about the love, self-destruction, absurdity, and ambition that define the millennials Soulful, gritty, and hilarious, Cannibals in Love is the debut novel from a bold new voice in fiction, and a manifesto for the generation that came of age at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Mike is about to graduate from college and inherit a world much different from the one he was promised. The World Trade Center towers have just fallen, the Beltway Sniper terrorizes the nation's capital, and a polarizing president pushes forward a dubious war. Told in eighteen vignettes, Mike's misadventures begin in Washington, D.C., and span Brooklyn, Portland, and Austin as he takes up arms with the overeducated, underemployed millennials who surround him. Nursing writerly ambitions, he works a series of humiliating jobs--counting lampposts, writing spam e-mails, babysitting a teenage boy--while composing a thousand-page novel about cows as an allegory for the invasion of Iraq. And at the center of the book resides a tumultuous, passionate love story that could arise only between two people with nothing to lose. Like a carefully assembled mixtape, Cannibals in Love weaves tender moments and summer idylls with violent late nights and the frustrations of a generation. From delirious off-track betting to a fateful walk across Kansas, Mike Roberts takes us into the guts of masculinity and identity in the age of the Internet, and joins an emerging group of young writers who are redefining the contemporary novel.
“I will make bold to say that Bowden is America’s most alarming writer. Just when you think you’ve heard it all you learn you haven’t in the most pungent manner possible. . . . With The Charles Bowden Reader in hand you get a taste of it all, and any literate resident or visitor should want this book. It will lead them back to a close, alarming reading of the entire oeuvre. It is to ride in a Ferrari without brakes. There’s lots of oxygen but no safe way to stop. . . . Read him at your risk. You have nothing to lose but your worthless convictions about how things are.” —Jim Harrison, from the foreword From his first book, Killing the Hidden Waters, to his most recent, Murder City: Cuidad Juárez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields, Charles Bowden has been sounding an alarm about the rapacious appetites of human beings and the devastation we inflict on the natural world we arrogantly claim to possess. His own corner of the world, the desert borderlands between the United States and Mexico, is Bowden's prime focus, and through books, magazine articles, and newspaper journalism he has written eloquently about key issues roiling the border—drug-related violence that is shredding civil society, illegal immigration and its toll on human lives and the environment, destruction of fragile ecosystems as cities sprawl across the desert and suck up the limited supplies of water. This anthology gathers the best and most representative writing from Charles Bowden's entire career. It includes excerpts from his major books—Killing the Hidden Waters, Blue Desert, Desierto: Memories of the Future, Blood Orchid, Blues for Cannibals, A Shadow in the City, Inferno, Exodus, and Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing—as well as articles that appeared in Esquire, Harper's, Mother Jones, and other publications. Imbued with Bowden's distinctive rhythm and lyrical prose, these pieces also document his journey of exploration—a journey guided, in large part, by the question posed in Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: "How do we live a moral life in a culture of death?" This is no metaphor; Bowden is referring to the people, history, animals, and ecosystems that are being extinguished in the onslaught of twenty-first-century culture. The perfect introduction to his work, The Charles Bowden Reader is also essential for those who know him well and want to see the whole panorama of his passionate, intense writing.
Objects of fear and fascination, cannibals have long signified an elemental "otherness," an existence outside the bounds of normalcy. In the American imagination, the figure of the cannibal has evolved tellingly over time, as Jeff Berglund shows in this study encompassing a strikingly eclectic collection of cultural, literary, and cinematic texts. Cannibal Fictions brings together two discrete periods in U.S. history: the years between the Civil War and World War I, the high-water mark in America's imperial presence, and the post-Vietnam era, when the nation was beginning to seriously question its own global agenda. Berglund shows how P. T. Barnum, in a traveling exhibit featuring so-called "Fiji cannibals," served up an alien "other" for popular consumption, while Edgar Rice Burroughs in his Tarzan of the Apes series tapped into similar anxieties about the eruption of foreign elements into a homogeneous culture. Turning to the last decades of the twentieth century, Berglund considers how treatments of cannibalism variously perpetuated or subverted racist, sexist, and homophobic ideologies rooted in earlier times. Fannie Flagg's novel Fried Green Tomatoes invokes cannibalism to new effect, offering an explicit critique of racial, gender, and sexual politics (an element to a large extent suppressed in the movie adaptation). Recurring motifs in contemporary Native American writing suggest how Western expansion has, cannibalistically, laid the seeds of its own destruction. And James Dobson's recent efforts to link the pro-life agenda to allegations of cannibalism in China testify still further to the currency and pervasiveness of this powerful trope. By highlighting practices that preclude the many from becoming one, these representations of cannibalism, Berglund argues, call into question the comforting national narrative of e pluribus unum.
At the age of twenty-six, Maarten Troost—who had been pushing the snooze button on the alarm clock of life by racking up useless graduate degrees and muddling through a series of temp jobs—decided to pack up his flip-flops and move to Tarawa, a remote South Pacific island in the Republic of Kiribati. He was restless and lacked direction, and the idea of dropping everything and moving to the ends of the earth was irresistibly romantic. He should have known better. The Sex Lives of Cannibals tells the hilarious story of what happens when Troost discovers that Tarawa is not the island paradise he dreamed of. Falling into one amusing misadventure after another, Troost struggles through relentless, stifling heat, a variety of deadly bacteria, polluted seas, toxic fish—all in a country where the only music to be heard for miles around is “La Macarena.” He and his stalwart girlfriend Sylvia spend the next two years battling incompetent government officials, alarmingly large critters, erratic electricity, and a paucity of food options (including the Great Beer Crisis); and contending with a bizarre cast of local characters, including “Half-Dead Fred” and the self-proclaimed Poet Laureate of Tarawa (a British drunkard who’s never written a poem in his life). With The Sex Lives of Cannibals, Maarten Troost has delivered one of the most original, rip-roaringly funny travelogues in years—one that will leave you thankful for staples of American civilization such as coffee, regular showers, and tabloid news, and that will provide the ultimate vicarious adventure.
“Surprising. Impressive. Cannibalism restores my faith in humanity.” —Sy Montgomery, The New York Times Book Review For centuries scientists have written off cannibalism as a bizarre phenomenon with little biological significance. Its presence in nature was dismissed as a desperate response to starvation or other life-threatening circumstances, and few spent time studying it. A taboo subject in our culture, the behavior was portrayed mostly through horror movies or tabloids sensationalizing the crimes of real-life flesh-eaters. But the true nature of cannibalism--the role it plays in evolution as well as human history--is even more intriguing (and more normal) than the misconceptions we’ve come to accept as fact. In Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History,zoologist Bill Schutt sets the record straight, debunking common myths and investigating our new understanding of cannibalism’s role in biology, anthropology, and history in the most fascinating account yet written on this complex topic. Schutt takes readers from Arizona’s Chiricahua Mountains, where he wades through ponds full of tadpoles devouring their siblings, to the Sierra Nevadas, where he joins researchers who are shedding new light on what happened to the Donner Party--the most infamous episode of cannibalism in American history. He even meets with an expert on the preparation and consumption of human placenta (and, yes, it goes well with Chianti). Bringing together the latest cutting-edge science, Schutt answers questions such as why some amphibians consume their mother’s skin; why certain insects bite the heads off their partners after sex; why, up until the end of the twentieth century, Europeans regularly ate human body parts as medical curatives; and how cannibalism might be linked to the extinction of the Neanderthals. He takes us into the future as well, investigating whether, as climate change causes famine, disease, and overcrowding, we may see more outbreaks of cannibalism in many more species--including our own. Cannibalism places a perfectly natural occurrence into a vital new context and invites us to explore why it both enthralls and repels us.
POE BALLANTINE’S RISKY PERSONAL ESSAYS are populated with odd jobs, eccentric characters, boarding houses, buses, and beer. He takes us along on his Greyhound bus journey through small town America (including a detour to Mexico) exploring what it means to be human. Written with piercing intimacy and self-effacing humor, Ballantine’stories provide entertainment, social commentary, and completely compelling slices of life.
Many stories involved fearsome creatures with supernatural powers. One of these creatures, now known as Bigfoot, passed beyond the realm of native lore and has become firmly entrenched in modern culture - for we too have seen this mysterious being. For countless ages before Europeans set foot in North America, native people inhabited the vast arctic regions, forests, deserts, and plains. They lived off the bountiful land, and developed unique cultures with stories of their heroes and adventures that have been passed down through successive generations. Many stories involved fearsome creatures with supernatural powers, believed to wander the land in a shadowy existence somewhere between reality and the unknown. One of these creatures, now known as Bigfoot, passed beyond the realm of native lore and has become firmly entrenched in modern culture - for we too have seen this mysterious being. Kathy Moskowitz Strain, a professional archaeologist and anthropologist with the U.S. Forest Service in California, presents in this volume a collection of verbatim stories from 55 native cultures that tell of giants, cannibals, and monsters in North America. We are taken to the campfires where such stories have been repeated for thousands of years by native elders and warriors. The work has been skillfully arranged with native culture profiles and hundreds of photographs of the respective native people in their various walks of life. Above all, this book is an adventure into the inner circles of our aboriginal people. It provides a unique insight into a part of their mythology, values, and spirituality. For those interested in this fascinating branch of human knowledge, this work is invaluable.